Letter from Bentonville Arkansas

Big or Small, Wal Mart wants it all. Mosaic created with FD's Flickr Toys.

Close readers of the blog may remember that a few months back I sparred with a Bentonviller about the quality of the downtown retail in that city. It wasn't written with a sneer, but I was trying to make the point that Wal Mart's endgame is a completely denuded retail environment other than its own stores, so it makes sense at the "Ground Zero" of independent retail destruction, Bentonville, Arkansas, the home of the Wal Mart Corporation, that the decline of the independent retail environment would be particularly advanced.

This thinking comes out of my proud Detroiter heritage. My joke about Detroit is that it is exactly what the auto industry intended to have happen to cities. Since the U.S. auto industry, until recently, has dominated the economic development agenda of that city, region and state, and so shaped U.S. economic and social policy for most of the period in which center cities were abandoned, it makes sense that Detroit is the most denuded and depopulated traditional center city in the United States.

I don't think that's an arguable point. Detroit has 55 square miles of vacant land, totaling almost 1/3 of the city. No other traditional U.S. center city is devastated to quite that level.

The point I was trying to make before is that creating desolate downtown retail districts is the logical end-game of the WalMart business model. So it makes sense that the independent retail environment in Bentonville would be about as bad off as the City of Detroit. (Note: I do think that independent businesses can compete with Wal Mart, but it is getting more difficult because the company is increasingly offering high-quality higher cost, but "comparatively" inexpensive best-in-class products in many categories, such as plasma televisions.) And the White Knuckled Wanderer lets us know in another entry that the downtown now has a coffee shop...

This Bentonville blog has a screed about Wal Mart and their ownership and under-use of arguably the most significant historic building in the downtown core, a three story building from the 1880s that Walmart treats not much different from a warehouse--tinted windows prevent people from looking in, an added untransparent door, and little ground-level use means that this beautiful building might as well be a box with four blank walls.

This great building ends up contributing very little to the street. He makes other good points about how other ground floor spaces throughout the downtown are being converted into vendor offices for Walmart, making it even more difficult to develop a vibrant downtown.

Tower Building, Bentonville, Arkansas. The Walmart museum is next door, in the right of the photograph. Photo by the White Knuckled Wanderer.

Producing blank walls is one of the Wal Mart Corporation's core competencies. Photo by the White Knuckled Wanderer.

I think it'd be hard as hell, because Wal Mart officials are likely the leaders of the local "Growth Machine," but pro-community advocates in Bentonville need to get a zoning overlay that requires ground floor retail...and after that, reparations...
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Update: I learned today that there are some mixed use residential projects moving forward in the core of the city, as well as some pending zoning changes to help bring these projects to fruition.
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Index Keywords: retail